The present invention relates to a document processing apparatus and, more particularly, to a document processing apparatus for processing a document having a hierarchical logical architecture.
A general document is divided into a plurality of blocks, and headings are assigned to the respective blocks. Each block is further divided into subblocks and subheadings are assigned to the respective subblocks.
Headings and subheadings are constituted by short sentences such as "abstract" or "summary". In addition, heading symbols are often added to these introductory portions, such as "Chapter 1" or "Section 3", respectively.
If document data having the hierarchical architecture described above is processed by a computer, the following problem is posed. Document data is processed in units of frames of the display or of pages of the printing sheets. According to this document data processing system, both the start and end positions of the document data for a chapter to be moved elsewhere must be designated when requesting the replacing of a given chapter with another. In this case, if the document data of the given chapter is long, the screen must be scrolled many times from the designation of the start position to the end position to be designated. Screen scrolling is cumbersome and tends to result in operational errors.
When an operator drafts a document, he often wishes to refer to the previous sentences. For example, he wishes to check the contents of the previous sentences and the kinds of the previous heading symbols. In this case, he must guess the page and the position of the line which include the sentence and heading symbol to be checked, and then search the desired sentence and heading symbol. The search operation is cumbersome and document drafting efficiency is greatly degraded.